Tuesday, 25 November 2008

Google has recently released SearchWiki, a set of tools for annotating Google search results. It's a rather dramatic change to the main search page, accesible by anyone logged into a Google account.

The interesting thing is that it seems like a personal version of Wikia Search (personal in the sense that only your alterations change the order of results, although you can see comments from everyone), though earlier comparisons were made more to link sharing sites like Digg.

So, might the emergence of this tool mean that Google is not, unlike so many others, underestimating the potential of Wikia Search?

Tuesday, 18 November 2008

Since the beginning of September, the bug tracker for MediaWiki has been sending weekly updates to the Wikitech-l mailing list, with stats on how many bugs were opened and resolved, the type of resolution, and the top five resolvers for that week. With eleven weeks of data so far, some observations can be made.

The following graph shows the number of new, resolved, reopened and assigned bugs per week (dates given are the starting date for the week). The total number of bugs open that week is shown in blue, and uses the scale to the right of the graph:

The total number of open bugs has been trending upwards, but only marginally, over the past couple of months. It will be interesting to see, with further weekly data, where this trend goes.

It also seems that the number of bugs resolved in any given week tends to go up and down in tandem with the number of new bugs reported in that week. Although there is no data currently available on how quickly bugs are resolved, I would speculate that most of the "urgent" bugs are resolved within the week that they are reported, which would explain the correlation.

Note also the spike in activity in the week beginning 6th October; this was probably the result of the first Bug Monday.

The second graph shows the breakdown of types of bug resolutions:

The distribution seems fairly similar week on week, with most resolutions being fixes. It's interesting to note that regularly around 25% to 35% of bug reports are problematic in some way, whether duplicates or bugs that cannot be reproduced by testers.

The weekly reports are just a taste of the information available about current bugs; see the reports and charts page for much more statistic-y goodness. And kudos to the developers who steadily work away each week to handle bugs!